mysteries

Last August, some SpongeBob SquarePants fans caught wind of the existence of a strange bootleg film about their favorite talking rectangle, only the vaguest traces of which could be found online, and began an obsessive search for the movie. Now, one year later, it has been revealed that A Day With SpongeBob SquarePants: The Movie never existed in the first place.

If you’re reading this article, you’re probably frustrated by the fact that, somewhere in your house or apartment, a smoke alarm with a dying battery is beeping, and beeping, and beeping—usually once every 60 seconds—but you cannot figure out where the alarm is located. The following solution to this problem will sound counter-intuitive, but it’s worked for me and others (Taylor Berman), so I’d like to share it with you:

Yesterday in Rio, a man shot and killed a mugger who tried to rob him while he was stuck in traffic. It would have been a fairly unremarkable story by Rio’s standards except that the victim-turned-killer—a man named Marcos Cesar Feres Braga—told police that he was a Russian diplomat, a tidbit that filtered up into news headlines.

On Friday, Page Six reported that CNN staffers were “pissed” and felt “betrayed” after the network’s president, Jeff Zucker, hired Donald Trump’s physically combative former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, as an exclusive contributor to CNN programming. Citing what appear to be at least three sources (including one “TV insider”), the column claimed that female and Latino staffers were particularly alarmed by Lewandowski’s new position:

Earlier this week, Forbesrevisited the tale of the notorious right-wing internet troll Charles C. Johnson and his $55 million defamation lawsuit against Gawker Media. The lawsuit, which concerns a series of stories Gawker and Deadspin published in late 2014, was dismissed in Missouri earlier this year; a similar complaint has languished in California with no action for several months (Gawker Media expects that it will be dismissed as well). What makes Johnson’s litigation particularly noteworthy, however, is the circumstantial evidence surrounding it. According to Forbes, some of this evidence suggests that Johnson had knowledge of Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel’s secret, decade-long legal attack on Gawker prior to its exposure last month.

On Sunday, an 18-pound, solid-gold eagle statue studded with diamonds and an emerald salvaged from a Spanish treasure ship was allegedly stolen from owner Ron Shore on the street in British Columbia, CBC reports.

Today, in a federal court in Illinois, former House Speaker Dennis Hastert confessed for the first time to sexually abusing high school students in the 1970s, when he worked as a teacher and wrestling coach in Yorkville, Illinois. The extent of the related charges (for which Hastert received a 15-month prison sentence), the sum of money—$1.7 million—Hastert paid to silence one of his accusers, and the length of time all of his deeds remained hidden made it all but inevitable that third parties knew about what happened, yet said or did nothing. But who?

For the past several days, including today, the most trafficked piece of content on Politico.com has been a slideshow of 17 wire pictures featuring Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton and her long-time aide Huma Abedin in various settings, including the 2008 campaign trail and several countries Clinton visited as Secretary of State. Its description refers to Abedin as Clinton’s “body woman”—an appellation borrowed, it seems, from a 2006 Observer article—and Abedin’s job as “assisting the former secretary of state’s move back into her private life.” Its title is, “How close are Huma Abedin and Hillary Clinton?”

Last week, Gawker received an anonymous tip attempting to stoke moral outrage within at least one of us, in hopes that we’d share it with the world. We receive quite a few tips of this nature, but the difference here was that the outrage was so obviously counterfeit, and so clearly calculated to get us to promote the object of that counterfeit outrage.

At last night’s Democratic town hall, CNN anchor Chris Cuomo asked Hillary Clinton to explain why she continues to withhold the transcripts of speeches she gave to several Wall Street banks between 2013 and 2015, for which she earned $2.5 million. You can watch the exchange above, or read the transcript below:

In defiance of her supporters’ wishes, her critics’ open calls, and even her own promises, Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton continues to block the publication of transcripts from the speeches she gave to several banks, including Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, in 2013 and 2014. According to MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski, however, Clinton may no longer have much of a choice.

Justice Antonin Scalia was taking a free vacation at the exclusive Cibolo Creek Ranch in West Texas when he was found dead inside a guest room Saturday. The trip, the Washington Postreports, was a gift from the ranch’s owner, who just last year obtained a favorable result from the Supreme Court.

On the morning of February 13, the owner of Cibolo Creek Ranch, in the west Texas town of Shafter, discovered the cold body of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in one of the ranch’s hotel rooms. The owner, John Poindexter, later told the San Antonio Express-News, “We discovered the judge in bed, a pillow over his head. His bed clothes were unwrinkled. He was lying very restfully. It looked like he had not quite awakened from a nap.”

In our current time of intermittent financial panics, the banking sector stands out in its unpopularity: major bank stocks are trading well below the book value of those banks. What has everyone so terrified?

The Tennessean reports that Rep. Stephen Fincher, a 42-year-old congressman representing Tennessee’s 8th district, will not seek re-election this year. In an emailed statement to the paper, Fincher declined to provide a specific reason for retiring. Uh oh.

Chris Hughes, the soon-to-be-former owner of The New Republic, recently purchased a West Village townhouse for $23.5 million (after unloading his old Soho loft for $8.5 million). According to the New York Post, Hughes’ new lair on West 12th Street boasts, among other amenities, a functional underground tunnel between its main building and a “carriage house” on the same property. But that’s not at all! Here’s what else we know about Hughes’ new tunnel: